What a clichéd statement!

Let me go at it again.

Actually, some things in life are best left explained. Failure to do so will result in situations, ranging from the sultry to the calamitous, that always make you feel that nothing short of an explanation will satiate your sense of satisfaction.

One such thing is my appearance.

Before you can start getting ideas, and by that, I don’t mean a new mobile connection, I would like to iterate that it is not about the fact that I have failed to enrol and win in any Mr. Handsome pageants, nor is it a racist whim whose solution may or may not be Fair and Lovely depending on how far you are willing to believe advertising claims, but it is just that… I somehow have a Mongoloid look.

Yes. Mongoloid.

Chinese. Japanese. Korean. Naga. Tibetan. Pilipino, Thai… Even Chinki (Racist Mo’fu’ers). I have been asked if I am that and much more.

The unexplained part is that I just don’t know how I got that look. For some background on me, I hail from a purely Konkani family that hasn’t seen many intercaste marriages happen in its fold. Everyone else in the family possesses the Aryan look that is characteristic of Hindu Konkani families. I have confirmed through reliable sources that I was not adopted, there is no one in my family with even remote connections to remote North East Indian places, and to my knowledge,and no one in my family has participated in a wicked genetic experiment conducted by the Chinese with the leakage of classified secrets being the primary goal. Moreover, none in my immediate family feel that I possess the Mongoloid look. This means that I was either born with that look, or I gradually morphed into a mascot for Sino-Indian relations over the course of 22 years.

Let me clarify that I have absolutely no problem when someone mixes up with my nationality. I have been in several hilarious situations that have risen because of the confusion regarding my nationality, many a times to my advantage. I still remember how a watchman at the electricity board thought that I was perhaps some foreign investor and gave me a full-fledged salute much to the amusement of myself and my accompanying friends. I remember how I have fooled various people into believing that I am a Tibetan refugee, a Kung-Fu master, a son of a Sumo-Wrestler, a Thai chef and many more!  I even memorized a few Mandarin syllables so that I can mix them up and create gibberish sentences which I can then pass of as any of Korean/ Japanese/Insert any Oriental language.

Why I am blogging about this now? Just yesterday, a young guy in the bus asked me if I am from Meghalaya. He even cared to tell me that there are no schools in Meghalaya and that is why “you people come here na”. I will leave this story for another blog post and tell you an incident that I remembered when this Meghalaya guy was talking. So lights off, and here it is.

I was travelling in one of the best bus routes in Mangalore (Route No. 19. For those who agree, give me a Hell, Yeah! ) As usual I was preoccupied with some thoughts which usually involve my mind proposing an argument and my mind doubling up as a Devil’s Advocate too. Halfway to my destination, at a place called Bejai, a guy boarded the bus and sat next to me. He was a balding guy and wore a T-shirt that could have said “Be my bitch” but at the moment was only interested in saying “Explore Dubai. Now” , with a picture of a person skiing with swimming goggles. (Really).(Nah, not personally insulting the guy in any way, just making some observations). The guy in question suddenly looks at his side and remarks “So, how do you find Mangalore?”

Me (gives a smile that plainly says ‘A little more context may help, boss ‘) : “Ummm….”

Stranger: “Mangalore is a very pleasant place right? I too love this place.”

Me (still not sure what is it all about, but gives a nodding smile anyway)

Stranger:“Have you visited all the tourist places? “

Me(oh, just harmless friendly chatter): “Yep, all that there has to be seen”.

Stranger: “Oh that is nice. How many days more are you going to stay in Mangalore?”

Me (Oh, so this is what it is all about! Let me play along): “Actually, I am a Tibetan refugee. I came to India a year back. I was staying in the Coorg camp (with the Coorg word spoken in as Tibetan an accent I can manage).I have enrolled in an engineering college so I am going to stay here for a few years.”

Stranger:” Ok. Mangalore people are very hospitable. But I should not see more of your country men settle here and spoil my beautiful city. Did I make myself clear? Keep your hands out of our daughters and get  lost to your ching-chong country as soon as possible”

Me (in a meek voice) : “Yes, sir”

I wanted to teach this racist scumbag a lesson. So I suddenly asked the conductor who was standing nearby “Nale eno bus bandh anta suddi keliddene. Enu vishaya gotta?” No need of translation. It was a statement in pure Kannada.

I loved the look on that man’s face when he heard me utter those words. I loved the way he got out of the bus the next stop even if he had purchased a ticket to a place that had not yet come.

Update : The sentence in kannada meant ” I heard there is a bus bandh tomorrow. What is the reason behind it ” . I said that just to show the guy that I knew kannada, that too fluently.

My last post ended on a very positive note, with me triumphantly pointing out that passion is the root of all satisfaction. So did I reach that holy grail of happiness? The negativity at the start of the post should more than answer this question.

Another semester is starting tomorrow, and I can’t deny that deep inside, I am still thinking of doing a “Shawshank Job “, or to better describe it, an “English, August” (escape).This time, it gets worse as I don’t even know if I have a Plan B if I indeed escape from my current reality. My friends all over have only one thing to say “If you leave this now, you will be making your biggest and most foolish mistake of my life”. I am not so blinded with distorted perceptions of happiness to disagree them. And in all probability, I am going to stay the course with the deeply calming thought that nothing is permanent.

When my vacations started, I vowed myself to get passionate about things, get immersed into them so much that I will never have an idle mind. This has never been a problem for me right through all my childhood and I love the fact that I have so many hobbies that 24 hours always sounds too less for a day.

But then, I realized that I had lost it. The fire was missing. It has become exceedingly harder for anything to catch my interest. In short, I have become numb.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I seem to have lost interest in quizzing. I fall asleep through movies now. Even music seems to have failed me. I don’t follow the Premier League anymore. It has been months since I made my last Wikipedia edit and I am content these days seeing my edits get vandalized. My tech projects are gasping for life. My writing seems to have deteriorated to the point of no return. I have stopped following education trends and no longer provide counselling to students. The idea of travel no longer gives me an adrenalin rush. My Hacker News addiction seems to have ended. Coding contests are greeted with indifference. My innumerable plans for many initiatives no longer get me excited with anticipation.

The most irritating part of it is that life has never been more normal before. I don’t have to worry about cooking my own food. I get a stipend for just attending classes. I studied only about 10% of what some of my fellow classmates did, but still ended up with good marks. (Friends say “That is because you are Suhas Pai. You don’t need to study!” Some of them are heavily over-rating me. The others are perhaps sarcastic). Contrary to all my complaints, I actually had a very productive semester. I am finally in an engineering college which I feel makes a sincere effort to impart education. I had a lot of “career or resume enhancing” moments. (Do I care about it anymore?)

So what’s wrong? As I end my post, I suddenly find myself coming out of the vinegar hangover. Apparently, writing it down brings some relief. I suddenly feel positive and vow myself to get myself interested in things. How will I do it? Well, not everything in life has answers.

The mission in question is the act of reading all my blog posts. (What a lame climax! Fire this guy.)  It was a piece of cake since the combined word count of all my posts still cannot match the length of a standard Arundhathi Roy essay, the more alarming part being that the information content in my posts are far less than those in the latter. Apart from noticing that my writing has taken a turn for the worse on every post, it occurred to me that the tone of the blog had changed, from being a blog that touched philosophy (for those readers with a smirk on their faces who have scrolled down to the end of the page and then remarked with a distasteful frown “He is lying”, Friends, the “philosophy” was introduced too subtly, which is the motive of this blog in the first place,  or maybe it is my imagination) to being a blog that has acquired  a more personal nature. A simple explanation to this paradigm shift would be that I would like to solve my own problems before poking fun at the world. Unsolved problems? A booming voice in my head, which is the voice I always imagine that I would possess 30 years from now, told me in its lecturer-like sing-song tone “Instead of writing pointless sentences, whose gist in the end can be summarized in fewer than 140 characters on a popular website, why don’t you solve your problems?”

Fickle-minded that I am, I promptly forgot the topic I was going to spew some sentences on and instead replaced my brain with a Turing machine that can accept only rationality.

With the preliminaries taken care of(drumming on the mouse pad of my laptop in anticipation, throwing threatening glances at my dog, making a common gesture with the middle finger held upright and then smiling  at how funny human fingers look, and tossing a coin to see if it eventually falls  flat because I had watched Inception just a day ago, and ensure that the coin falls right inside   my pocket because I have been practicing Rajni’s tricks from Shivaji) , I finally settle down to exercising my right and the art of solving problems. The fact that there were preliminaries meant I was hesitant. I usually don’t ROFL looking at my fingers and my dog doesn’t entertain eye-to-eye conversations, although it is true that I sometimes prefer hand gestures over face gestures.

Problem Definition: My previous posts indicate that I have a problem finding happiness. I could work that one out, thanks to the suggestive title of one of my posts “In pursuit of happi(y)ness”.

OK. Going down towards finer layers of granularity. Define “Happiness”. At this point I have to remember that because of the rationality- only condition, I can’t use abstract dictionary meanings nor quote conveniently from Wordsworth (or keeping with the present times, Chetan Bhagat). I need an explicitly quantifiable expression representing happiness which can be manipulated mathematically in several contexts.

Impossible?

Then let’s take a different path. Why do I feel that I am missing happiness now when I haven’t felt that before? Can this revelation imply that I was happier before?

The previous question gave me a glint in the eye. Yes, I had been happier before. My childhood was like an ultra-long honeymoon with no sex and full frolic. I had gone through some tough times since then, only to be back to my previous self in the last two years of my engineering days. Was I happy during my engineering days? For those who know me well, I hated my college (not the management but the environment) with a passion. I lived in an ocean of regret on my choice of college and was always ready with my grumblings to anyone with so much as half an ear to listen to them.

But let’s get back rationality into the picture. Hatred and regret doesn’t necessarily translate into unhappiness. Contentment and happiness have two very distinct meanings. The last sentence rang a bell.  Are contentment and happiness inversely proportional? If you aren’t content with how things are panning out, then you lose happiness. When you get things going your way, you get happiness. But then in this characterization, happiness becomes a mirage. It is an endless loop, which by the way, is exactly what life is all about. What if you are the embodiment of contentment? This leads to a static characterization. You are either happy all the time or you are not. Which possibility is true?

Statistics point to the latter. Opinion Polls, the Human Happiness Index, the Happiness Quotient etc all point out that the Scandinavian countries are the least happy of all. Yes, the Scandinavian countries that have the lowest poverty rate, the lowest crime rates, the lowest corruption rates in the world. While I don’t believe in opinion polls for many reasons like the sample space being too small, the questions being not representative of the general trend, and the human inability to know what they know, so many polls bringing out the same results bring some credibility to the results.

One can infer from the above that it is the lack of contentment that leads to happiness indirectly.But…I am not convinced. Let me explore another angle.

Why did I have a happy childhood? Was it because of a lack of contentment? Bringing back rational reasoning, innocence of childhood doesn’t translate to a happy childhood. We all had innocent childhoods with our parents shielding us from all our problems, but a happy childhood is a totally different matter.  I know quite a few people whose childhood sucked and they readily agree to that. So what was so special in my life back then?

Before I could get caught into a nostalgia spree, I already got the connect (Quizzer style). There was one common thread that ran through all the earlier days of my life.

Passion.

This brings me to a time when a few of my friends had “fallen in love” .Some of them requited, others unrequited. While the “love failures” were planning of leading a life in the Himalayas for mourning(ROFL), I told them it is not love as they thought, but it was a psychological condition called “Limerence”(Check Wikipedia for an awesome article on it.  P.S : Jimmy Wales ads rock) The main cause of this condition is an idle mind, which is not only a devil’s workshop, but also an abattoir of happiness.(Ever heard of the phrase “Too busy to fall in love”?)

I succumbed to my fickle-mindedness and digressed from the plot. Getting back, passion was what made me busy. Passion was what made me have so many hobbies. Passion was why I wished a day had more than twenty four hours. Passion was why I fell asleep as soon as I went to bed because I had so many exciting things to do the next day.

But now all that has changed. Why? I don’t have an answer. I work much lesser than all of my classmates. (for a different reason). In fact, I am almost as free as I was during my B.E days, except that I spend an unnatural amount of time grumbling that I don’t have time for anything else. I have just lost interest in a lot of my hobbies.

No. I need to erase my last sentence. I have not lost interest in any of my hobbies. I have lost the passion in them. My mind is idle, like that of an animal. Suboptimal use of optimal organs. I haven’t fallen prey to limerance or other psychological conditions (I am stronger than that), but then an idle mind has made me lose my piece of mind.

Therefore, this vacations. I make a resolution. To end all sorts of procrastination, and to regain my passion. And to retain my passion for the rest of my life.

This is my new mission. As all “cool” mission names go, I have a Greek name in handy : Mission Pi.

Anyone wants to join me?

Update: Philosophy apart, I finished my first semester to a much anticipated break. From sleeping in corridors to getting featured on the front page of Hacker News for totally unexpected reasons, it has been a wild journey. A journey, which has been a learning curve in the bigger scheme of things.

“So what about the media? What did they do?” I wanted a stupid answer so that I could attack it. He delivered it in style.

“The Media? What did they NOT do? And what are they NOT doing right this moment? I don’t blame you for your ignorance. Six years without a T.V is a good enough excuse for you. In fact, it is a blessing. You know, the media is making our life hell these days. So much sensationalization, so much undue hype, so much concentration on trivial matters. Did you see their breaking news? Today it was about Amitabh tweeting to his son about coming home early to lunch! The media have been discussing whether Amitabh has declared war on cellular operators and decided to use Twitter as his main communication medium! What use is this news to us? Bland, dirty celebrity gossip! No wonder the whole world calls us as voyeurs! Now you know who the culprit is.

Did you see the systematic way with which the media destroyed the Commonwealth Games? With all that hype over a few unclean toilets, they have successfully and irreparably damaged the reputation of India. Welcome back, snake charmer days! Why couldn’t they be responsible and shown the good things about the CommonWealth Games too? Why not show the world class stadiums? Ok. Leave it at that. How about the Ayodhya mess? Do you think anyone is still bothered over that? It is their hype that made it a serious issue in the first place.

And what is that all about “How do you feel “type of questions? It seems to be on every journalist’s default questions list. They ask that question everywhere, when a woman is raped, when a man loses his child in a terrorist attack, when a player wins a cricket match, even when a bookie is caught. Are we so stupid? Don’t we know what they must be feeling? Why hear it from the horse’s mouth every time? Whenever I switch on the T.V these days, I feel like puking. Just check my Twitter account; it is full of angry tweets that come from my bruised mind fresh from the media assault. I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT!”

He was gasping for breath at the end of his rant. I was almost alarmed but then I remembered that I had to give him a fitting response. There were so many things that were fundamentally wrong with that outburst. As a nihilist, I don’t think anything is “wrong”, so I need to change that word to “logically void”. So, giving him my nasty “I am going to win anyway” look, I began my offense.

“Ok. So the media has made your life hell. You just can’t stand those “sensationalist” T. V channels right? I have a solution for you, a simple one at that. Ever heard of a remote control? Man’s greatest invention after democracy, this device provides you with a great thing. Choice. If you don’t like it, you are free to change the channel! No one is forcing you to watch things that make your life hell.

And celebrity gossip as headlines? No one finds it important? Well, let me tell you. The Media is run by shrewd businessmen, with one word in mind” T.R.P”. And before you talk about my arithmetic skills, let me tell you it is three words because it is an acronym. They run celebrity gossip news because there is a market for it. Why on earth would they publish news that no one would not watch? And I bet you, regardless of what you think, a bigger part of India is more concerned about Salman Khan’s receding hairline than the effects of sand mining on the Coramandel coast. This is not a bad thing, because you know what, it is their choice! If all that people want is celebrity gossip, then let them watch it and let the media feed them with it!

If you are concerned with the “How do you feel” questions, which I agree is a pretty redundant thing to ask, again the solution is the same. Switch to another channel! Maybe News Channel A is just not your cup of tea!. I hear some news channels are brainwashing innocent people by feeding propaganda. Well, this is certainly not a threat to the country unless it is government controlled. If you feel disgruntled, worry not, for the opposite party has equal rights to start a new news channel which serves as their propaganda machine! That is the great thing about a democracy and rather than complaining, you should feel proud of this system.

If you feel these news channels are depriving you of savouring “real” news by providing only sensationalist Breaking News, I have a choice for you. DD News. They are as “news-like” as a channel can get. They are not sensationalist, they are not filled with reporters with high decibel levels, they even cover the weather and the most important, they are not a government mouth piece. Did you realize the importance of that? There are so many countries in the world where the government owned/controlled news channels are just propaganda engines; in fact private news channels are not even allowed to operate in many countries. Did you realize the privileges we have been enjoying?

Now, back to DD News. Why is it not so popular? After all, it is the only channel which is a “true news channel” by your standards. I have seen the news readers there and some of them could fancy their chances in a beauty contest with the more popular females from the private channels. Yet, nobody cares. Why?

Because there is no rock music playing in the background when the breaking news are announced. Because there is no yelling, screaming and chest thumping. Because no one syas repeatedly “This is a DD News Exclusive”. Because some of the women wear saris your grandmothers used to wear.(Nothing wrong with that).

And more importantly, because they deliver only plain boring news.

A few months ago, I was at the crossroads of life, with my engineering degree acting like a chequered flag telling me “Your time at the tracks is over. Move over to the podium and then get lost”. And on June 14^th, with my final year project evaluation out of the way, I had reached the podium, and it was time to come to a decision.

Should I race on? Should I change my tyres before proceeding? Or is it time to leave racing altogether? Umpteen questions which everyone faces when they move out of their comfort zone(undergraduate studies) and are on the threshold of  entering the big, bad world. So why should I fret over it? After all, every one is in the same situation, so it is not that big a deal to cook an omlette on your head over it.

But well, I needed to fret over it. As Slumdog Millionaire says in no uncertain terms , “It is written”. So, there started a series of brainstorming sessions with only one agenda on the horizon “Where do I want to see myself in the future?”

As a computer science engineer, I would say that there is ample ambiguity in the above question with the word ‘future’ loosely defined, but assuming that I can skip the requirements analysis phase claiming that it already exists within me, I jumped to the next stage : Evaluation of alternatives

1. Be a normal person and go get a job.

This sounded quite appealing. Time to be in a ‘professional’ environment. Meet new people. Work in a team (isn’t that awesome!, I only see team work happening in reality shows on TV). Work on new challenges. And most importantly, get a significant bulge in your shirt pocket (Of course, I am not talking about breast/chest enlargement and I don’t wear shirts with pockets at the abdomen. It is just that I find it illogical to have a wallet and thus keep my money in the shirt pocket). Yes, I am weird. Continue reading.

A job would enable me to indulge myself in all the things out of my reach. But then came the question, what would I spend on? I am a very frugal person even by Indian standards. I don’t think I will ever learn driving/riding in my life, so a vehicle is out of the question. I am not a very big fan of clothes and have a lot of food related problems.

Finally, I came to the conclusion that I will find new ways to spend money once I start earning it.

The next question then was

1.1    What sort of job should I take?

Now, beggars aren’t exactly choosers, so the above question stands null and void. But I disagree with this notion. My resume doesn’t look too bad and I am trying to be humble when I say that I have landed a job in no less than 4 companies, with only Infosys showing me the boot. The main question was whether I wanted a industy/non-industry job.

What non-industry jobs did I have in mind?

1. Join Nirmala Travels/ Vikram Travels as a travel guide
2. Become a lecturer and try to bring a change in the education system from within(haha. Dry laugh.)
3. Become a banker, like everyone in the 80’s did. I have a fascination for everything 80’s.

Option i. looked fascinating, as travel is my foremost passion, but the prospect of going around different places and falling sick owing to my fragile digestive system didn’t look too enticing. In the general public interest in mind, I ticked off this option. And heck, it was too unrealistic. I like to call myself unconventional, but I have to admit I fear the crowd.

Option ii. was more realistic, as during my engineering days, I discovered that I had a flair for lecturing people(on philosophical matters). On a serious note, I knew I would do well in this field, but then I realized I was not qualified enough to become a lecturer. Any Obama-like talk about change in the education system can be achieved only if the initiators practice what they preach, and for that I needed to be properly qualified with atleast an M.Tech. So again, Option ii, atleast for the immediate future is out.

Option iii.  was a joke. I just hated to admit I had only 2 options on board.

2. I am still far from ‘complete’. So lets do higher studies.

2.1    Which field do you want to persue?

1. M.Tech – Like every normal VTU student, I wasn’t very confident about my technical skills, with all the last minute studying(not learning) and little or no exposure to ‘practical’ stuff. But the online coding fests, the GATE exam and the final year project changed all that. I got to know that I wasn’t that bad as I had made out to be. But I was still a raw product straight from the VTU factory, I needed to polish myself to upgrade my status from ‘uncut’ to ‘in the process of being cut” .

So where should I persue M.Tech? IIT’s? Stop joking. At this moment , a voice in my brain makes me hesitate at the keyboard as I type in the following : Perhaps I can make it to IIT as well, but then I would have to waste a year waiting for the next GATE. Dreams apart, how about more realistic targets? NITK? MIT, Manipal? Wait a minute, how about foreign universities? Many of my friends had told me that life isn’t complete without a proper university experience. From a long time, I had been fascinated by Western universities and had dreamt of studying in them. But then, I always knew it was a pipe dream. I could barely afford the university application forms, leave alone the living costs and the tuition fees.

Then, I came to know about this wonderful dual degree program that was offered free of cost with all living expenses. One year in India and one year in Europe. Since, it was completely free, I expected it to be extremely competitive and very limited. I knew I had to get into the top ten ranks nationwide , if I could start dreaming about research in a university setting. Here comes my real test, I thought. I spent exponentially more time wondering how I will fare in my exam than studying for it. I dropped the plan of studying for the exam altogether with the following logic : If I couldn’t understand a concept in 4 years of engineering, I cant get it by studying a few days before the exam. And if I knew a concept well, I wouldn’t have to study it.

imagine my surprise when I discovered I had scored 8 marks higher than the next highest scorer in the entrance exam!(to be very honest, I wan’t that surprised).  So, I wasn’t that bad after all!. Maybe I underestimated myself! And the subsequent interview process was more of a ‘Learning about Myself’ course , which demands a blog post for itself.

ii . MBA

I don’t have the requisite communication skills, nor the presentation flair and definitely no the motivation to be an MBA. However, the sole reason why I wanted to do an MBA was because I felt the entrance tests were my cup of tea. All the sections, especially the ones in CAT were the ones I considered as my strong points. Hence I had a feeling that I could possibly be playing jingle bells over the summer.

My reasoning went like this : I will clear CAT and get into a good college now. Who knows, maybe I will develop a real motivation for it later. And communication skills can always be improved. Can’t they?(NO)

So looking after all these options, plus some more, which included sitting at home(some would say that is gross), joining my friend on a startup, making a movie(Yes, I can dream), becoming a pygmy agent(awesome, aint it?), the omlette on my head started literally burning.

Time to make the design decision before moving on to the implementation.

Software engineering principles state that there should be a sound rationale behind any design decision.

My rationale goes like this in the form of a formal proof

p: Aim of life is to be happy

q. I will be happy if I learn more

r. I will be happy if I make myself less ‘incomplete’ by getting the complete picture  in my field of interest

s. I will be happy doing research in a Western university environment

p is true. q,r,s are true. I have succeeded the “Aim of Life” stuff.

I joined M.Tech/M.S because I wanted CS concepts to be crystal clear at my mind. I want to talk hours about the subject without doubting what I am talking about. Right now my knowledge is splintered with a lot of disconnected joints, I need to fix them and  M.Tech is the platform for it.

Hence , the decision was made and I was so happy that I finally know what I wanted!!

It is 3 weeks since my classes have started. You must be imagining that I am on cloud nine. But the reality is that I am on ground zero. This has not panned out to be what I thought it would be. In short, I am not happy.

Proposition p,q,r,s still holds true. But I doubt any of that happening with the GPA craze. The pressure to score. The pressure to attend classes daily and maintain minimum attendance. This is not what I signed up for.

I am not happy again.

1. Locate your mouse. Most probably, the cursor is right on top of a red button marked X, which is where mouse pointers usually lurk when the user unsuspectingly lands on boring blogs that claim to be written by a nihilist.
2. Perform the scroll operation. Scroll down until you reach Dilemma’s of a Nihilist Part-1.
3. Check out the date it was published and exclaim “Even the Transformers sequel came much earlier!”
4. Take back those words that you just blurted out, yes, the factually incorrect one where you try to lead people to believe that a sequel of a high-on-graphics movie was released just two months after the original.
5. Admit that it was a lame analogy.
6. Skim through the post now, and raise your eyebrows and point your eyeballs in the general direction of nowhere and say “Oh, this post.”

Yeah, this post. The one where I spew out random words and my subsequently unconcealed surprise when I discover these words actually make coherent sentences, which is reflected in my posts by the excessive usage of the superlative.
Note that the previous sentence is a blatant lie, but you know what, I had bathed everyday the last week. Yeah, I am a random sentence generator.

Now, that I am done with all the smart-assness which in the end can be summed up by the oft misused phrase ‘beating around the bush’ , it is time to come to the explanation(not justification).

This may come as the greatest swathe of irony you have come across, but the reason why instead of helping out women from ditches or tunnels I am writing pages and pages of ‘envy inducing posts’ (according to a comment on the Part 1 post. Really?, is the inability to help the fallen be a cause for envy?) and in turn make you read thus wasting your valuable time in which you could perhaps have saved a million ladies from getting buried in pits/tunnels/ditches/manholes is that I am a simple man.

(Yes. I know that I have set the bar of helpfulness to a whole new level by including the word ‘manhole’.)

I am a simple man. And simple men solve the problems of their life using simple equations. We are that breed of people who are the sole cause for the optimism of scientists who claim that they can build computers that are as powerful as a human’s brain.

My brain is organized like a database. I have grouped the data in tables, and have taken pains to ignore slight differences between similar types of data, using a process called homogenization. I have a set of templates stored within myself and everything in this world, except for Rajanikanth and Chuck Norris of course, falls in one of these templates.
I harbor a lot of pre-conceived notions which helps me out a great deal because I can take non critical decisions like selecting which stranger to sit next to in the bus.

My template matching system says that I have to assume every foreigner walking on the streets of Udupi to have a stash of marijuana waiting to be ‘smoked up’. It also says that if I am in a closed room with a bunch of people and my wallet gets stolen, I should start suspecting the most poorly clad person as the culprit.

Of course, the number of tables in the database varies from person to person. The lesser the number of tables, the more “narrow minded” he becomes. For example, a person with very less number of tables would instantly brand anyone with a turban and a beard as a terrorist, while a ‘complex’ person, who would have an almost infinitely large number of tables, would still maintain that the rest of the world is targeting an innocent person, even if the man possesses a turban, beard and in addition to that a bomb and some scary looking chemicals and raccoons.

Wait a minute. I was of course being sarcastic. I don’t really look at every foreigner here as a hippie. I don’t think much about selecting the stranger to sit next to in the bus. (I prefer positional convenience over social proprietary). I pride myself as a rationalist.(Do I?). However, I am still a simple man. Like we all are. All of us are. We use a lot of generalization techniques to simplify out day to day decision making tasks. Let me explain one that I experienced.

It was the time after Second P.U. that everyone says is the most crucial days of your life. While some students pack off to coaching centers so that they can ‘get a hang’ of the first semester syllabus, others decide to spend their last days with their P.U friends before they get separated for four years, after which everyone ends up working in Infosys.

I, in the meanwhile had made a lot of friends at the CET counseling centre (Yes!). We had really hit it off, partly due to the fact that we were going to end up in the same college (No, Not P.A). We used to meet up more regularly than parliament, and mind you, the parliament session was going on back then.

One particular day, some of them had come to Mangalore and we were loafing around near the Empire Mall bus stop, when a girl who was a close friend of theirs passed by and stopped to talk to us. The mandatory introductions then occurred, as one of my friends introduced me to her. I removed my hand from my pocket and offered it to her.
She. Wait. Let me take it to the next paragraph for more dramatic effect.

She extended both of her hands. Raised them. Folded them. The Big Indian Namaste. A huge roar of laughter engulfed my ears. There were 8 pairs of eyes watching keenly to see what my next move was. A handshake snubbed me was visibly hurt/upset/embarrassed/shocked/humiliated/gutted/heart-wrenched/suicidal (Ok,not the last one). Of course, I was a big loser back then, still basking in my adolescence. However, now I am currently a proud owner of the Null emotion, which means that no hand-shakes = Null emotion. Total indifference.

But 4 years ago, that was a major thing in my insignificant life. I was standing there with one of my hands outstretched, like they do in those P.T drill or whatever term you choose to call that futile exercise practiced by millions of children at the school assembly every day. I made a decision then. No more handshakes with females. Of course I would be deprived of some social customs and vice versa, but then I wouldn’t like to get slapped on the face just the day before I have a Software Engineering Exam. (Surprised? That is called getting to the point. Actually, I just got tired of writing).

Just on the past evidence of 2 factors made me take the drastic decision of denying the opportunity of shaking my hands with any female.

1. That most of the people who denied and showed Bharatiya Sanskar were females
2. That most of the people who accepted handshakes were men.

Now, based on these two simple facts, I came to the conclusion that it is safer for me to offer handshakes to men without facing the risk of being snubbed.
I also came to the conclusion that there is a higher probability of a handshake offer being rejected in case of women.

So, was my action justified? For those who disagree, please go a few paras above and look at the variety of emotions running around in my head.
Now, was my action justified?

Let’s go right to the point. The point I wanted to make for which I divulged quite a few incidents of mine and my friend’s past.

Airport Security. Anyone who is not ‘White’ is usually stopped as part of a “random check”. The “randomly checked” people complaining of racism. Prime ministers and Presidents holding talks about this issue. Politically correct statements released.

Two Factors.

1. Most of the people involved in Terrorism in the United States are not Caucasians
2. Very less number of Caucasians have been involved in terrorist activities.

Isn’t the random checking of Indians/Pakistanis justified?

The only problem I got with the system is that it shouldn’t be called ‘random’. Please don’t change the meaning of the word and cause reprints of the dictionary.
Come up front and tell that you would like to conduct additional checking for every non-White.

And to the Indian who got a problem with this. If you have a problem, feel free to stay in your ‘home country’. Yeah, that’s about it. A simple solution.

P.S: Of course, I offer handshakes to everyone now, regardless of what sex they belong to.
I don’t mind if anyone doesn’t return it, except that I find it amusing now.
I was too immature back then, but that is what adolescence is all about :-}

When presented with Plan A, Plan B and Plan C, I usually choose the now renowned Plan Z, which is to do nothing at all and stay at home. Plan Z has now been a trademark of mine from quite some time now. I still remember the heady Seventh semester days when a wave of technical insatiation befell me and my cranium was overflowing with links of homepages of the faculty of various and sometimes obscure universities, ranging from Stanford to the South Harmon Institue of Technology where Jonah Hill is waiting to teach you DecisionMaking 999. These links contained a wealth of information on exciting cutting edge research that is the sole cause for the downfall and annihilation of the science fiction industry. I was overcome by the vampiric thirst of doing a solo project and getting lost into the now doesn’t-look-like-it-is-so-wonderful world of computer “science”. However, my decision making abilities ensured that I spent more time thinking whether I was really not interested in database design or was it the dull tone of the textbook author which had failed to impress me. Nevertheless, I had Plan Z to the rescue. Instead of breaking blood over deciding which project to do, why not implement Plan Z and not do anything at all?

Plan Z was a major success. And my busy life whirred down to the speed of the bike of the Gandhian lecturer, cautiously riding so as not to flout any traffic rules and remain a role model to the student populace.

The lecturer was a true Gandhian, so the concept of Poorna Swaraj naturally implied that traffic rules were meant to be flouted and that role models are usually long haired and zoom on Yamaha Bikes, so of course I got into new things and my life was back on the fast lane.

My latest stint at decision making came a week back, when I was presented with 3 plans.

Plan A: Go to the Impulse Fest, at NMAMIT, Nitte

Plan B: Go to college and rejuvenate your now-in-cobwebs project idea (You got it right, it is still an idea)

Plan Z: Ditch both and sit at home and watch that Antonio Margheriti scene of Inglourious Basterds again, and chuckle at the appropriate places, including one in a particularly violent manner.

Impulsively, Plan Z was at the forefront of my decision making queue. But being a true blue computer science student, I decided to adopt fair scheduling and considered all my options . Here was how the decision making process went.

Plan Z Advantages:

1. I get to watch Antonio Margheriti in Inglourious Basterds spell out his name without the music in it, one more time.
2. I get to post on social networking sites that I have missed the fest and end the sentence with a frowney.
3. I get to spend more time on thinking about new ideas for projects which I WONT be doing.
4. I get to think about whether Plan Z was a sane decision or not, blissfully aware of the fact that Z stood for zany.

Plan B advantages:

1. Show your face to people around so that I don’t find an old photo of mine appearing in the missing person’s list.
2. More time to convince my project team mates that “this project can make or break your career”.
3. More time to coax one of my project team mates to come to college in the first place.

Plan A advantages:

1. I get to meet my blog-guru Dayanand for the first time ever, and by that  strike one of my wishes off my bucket list, and hopefully  participate in at least one event in a fest with him in my team.

Something happened. The gums stopped bleeding. The decision engine got a massive speed boost. The first advantage of Plan A was so powerful that I experienced an impulse shock, which essentially blocked out the remaining advantages off my decision queue and thus, I witnessed the first impulsive decision that had escaped my brain from a long time. It was Plan A all the way.

Since it is turning out to be a pretty long post, I will write about my experiences in the next post. This post is of course dedicated to that blog guru who had been asking for this post ever since the Haiti earthquake.

Therefore, the second phase is the one where I go through the textbooks again so that I make sure that all the “keywords” are buckled into my memory seatbelt. This painful ritual is lovingly referred to in the education industry as “Revision”, which benefits no one but the mobile service providers who go laughing all the way to the bank as people frantically message each other “How many times did you finish revising?” and getting jealous or more miserable , depending on the reply. There is a third emotion, and that is of exasperation, and that is when you don’t receive a reply at all. This is the method which I dutifully follow, but at the risk of being apprehended the next time you go to college in this way “This guy was studying so much that he couldn’t even reply!!” Well, I am not much of a mobile guy in the first place, so this method pretty much works for me.

Anyway, the second phase gets me so bored that I usually plunge into nostalgia. All the old incidents that I have bothered to solder into my brain come back pouring subconsciously. In computer parlance, you can call it a DMA transfer. I start thinking about all those incidents that have made me what I am now, and relish in its warmth.. Here is one of those incidents that particularly invaded into my study time this time around.

Story 1

Place:  Commercial Street,   Bangalore

Date: Around December 2006

Context: Dr. Rajkumar had passed away and people had found a new messiah upon whose death they would get the chance to again set fire on vehicles in front of T.V cameras. The anointed successor (or so they thought) had just stormed into the lives of unsuspecting neighborhoods with a movie called Mungaru Male which brought a terrifying new dimension to the phrase “Love Failure”.

Background material required for the story : My friend Justin (name not changed), whom I call a cool guy , had this habit of roaming around the swankier places of Bangalore on evenings all alone , just watching the world go around him hurriedly as he strolled by calmly.

Assumptions that you should not make:  Firstly, Justin wasn’t a friendless “loser”. According to him, he went on these walks for some “soul searching”, to put in his own words. Secondly, he wasn’t really the guy trying to live the “Great-Indian-Metropolitan-City-Dream” which involved visiting ‘maals’ and talking to the salesmen in incoherent English and receiving replies in equally incoherent English. If there was anyone who felt at home in a posh street in a metropolitan city, it had to be him because he was one of those guys who would make the so-called self-righteous people to think about African kids who haven’t yet been adopted by a particular Hollywood actress and why these people can’t be of any help to them.

Actual story: Justin was on one of his usual walks, one not so fine evening. Incidentally, there were some road repairs happening on the street on which he decided to step foot on. A road repair in Bangalore would invariably involve a dug tunnel which makes you remember The Shaswhank Redemption, and this one was no less. Justin was more interested in searching for his soul . Just at that time, two women came walking in front of him. They were aged around 20, and their attire was enough for someone to conclude that these women were from some elitist family. Too badly enough, one of these ladies was wearing heels so uncomfortable that walking on them made you fall into tunnels that remind you of The Shaswhank Redemption. This was precisely what happened.  Actually, they weren’t tunnels in a strict sense, but well, I am making sure that the lady gets a fair trial in my court.

Anyway, the lady fell into the tunnel. Wham. And it turned out that her friend belonged to that category of people who neither burst into laughter nor jumped to help but stood like a zombie. A double Wham. So now, the onus was on Justin to rub his hands and get down to business. And down he did, rolling his sleeves and lending a hand which she could use to get out of the mess. Well, the place wasn’t dirty enough for my standards to warrant a bath, and the tunnel wasn’t tunnel enough to warrant someone’s help; even the Hobbit could get out on its own. But Justin still attended the call of duty, only to find that one hand wasn’t enough. The woman was much heavier. So out came the second hand which grabbed her arms upwards of the elbow and finally brought her back to zero level altitude.

Next second, she slapped him.

A fifteen time Wham from my side.

On the face.

In a place where a lot of people watch Puneet Rajkumar movies and are desperate to become heroes and where their only chance to become a hero is to beat up guys who have done something so horribly wrong that their “sister” slaps them, getting slapped on the street by strangers isn’t a great idea.

To be fair, nothing of that sort happened. What happened was that the woman remarked to her friend in Hindi (I will roughly translate it)” Yet another of these desperate low-class guys ever so keen to get his hands on an unsuspecting woman’s body”. This was the final blow. The parting shot hit Justin where it hurt the most and that place was not the reddened cheek.

Justin made a really big deal out of this incident, which is evident to you by my explanation of the incident in such graphic detail. I stay more than 400 km s away from him, but I heard so much about this incident that I can make WordPress ban me for exceeding my allotted memory. It became a very big thing in our friend’s circle. Personally, I thought he was just making a big deal out of it.

End of Story 1

P.S: No, It is not what you are thinking. That guy had no reason to enjoy touching some random lady on the street, if you know what I mean.

Story 2:

Place: Jyothi Bus stop, Mangalore

Date: 2 days before the first exam of my fifth semester (S.E Exam), December 2008

Context: The infamous pub attacks were still a couple of months away, so people were still indifferent to women who wore “western” clothes and followed “pub culture” which was obviously not a “good culture”. Mangalore is also a city which is mentioned in tourist brochures as a city where people will fight over each other to help you.

Background Material required for the story : Nothing much, except that you should know that whenever I am alone, I will usually be debating with myself about some issue of grave national importance with the criteria for what is nationally important being decided by me. That issue maybe something like whether it is ethical to convert my dog into a vegetarian.

Actual Story: I had gone to a classmate’s place to “teach” Software Engineering to a few classmates. After a pretty tiring day on which I had to speak nonsense continuously for a few hours, I had come back to the Jyothi bus stop to take a bus back home. It was around 8 in the night and it is the time when there are more cars on the road than people in the street. I was waiting for the bus when I saw a couple of girls armed with a boy who were walking across to Goldfinch, to obviously have a good time. The boy showed he still had what it takes to be Indiana Jones by crossing the road even when there were Express buses with literally hungry drivers on the prowl.

The girls decided that the bus drivers could have their dinner peacefully at home and not in the lock-up so they kept walking ahead. But one of the girls had other ideas and promptly fell into the small pit which had been made maybe for road repairs. The pit was right in front of me.

And…? I suddenly remembered Justin. I looked at the girl. Her attire was one which told you she came from one of those elitist families. She was wearing a sleeveless top which meant that any safety mission required some “sensitive” part contact. She was also wearing heels which were so uncomfortable that they made you fall into tunnels which reminded you of The Shaswhank Redemption. And I did it.

What? I just stood there. As if nothing had happened. I could feel Mother India wiping off her tears as one of her sons had just trudged along the Path of Evil. I looked around and found that there were a few more people there. All of them staring. One of them bent to see her cleavage by the way. And finally it was her friend who took her out of the mess.

Again, it wasn’t much of a pit. Even the Hobbit could get out without any help. But that wasn’t the point. The point is that I denied help to some one based on heuristics. Based on past testimony of a friend about a slightly similar incident long ago, that too with different characters. I was shocked by my actions (or rather, my inactions) and Software Engineering was relegated to a corner as I spent an insane amount of time thinking about it. Well, I found the reason why I did it. But then, I don’t have a passport which means that I cannot go to London to receive the Guinness award for the longest blog post so I will leave that explanation (not justification) to another post which will come soon. The explanation will enable me to show you a bigger picture, which is why I wrote this post in the first place.

Ever since I found a CAT question paper in my neighbor’s garbage some 5 years ago(No, I was neither scourging for food nor displaying my voyeuristic instincts there), I had made up my mind to write the CAT. The fact that I haven’t ever displayed anything that even remotely showed any semblance to good managerial skills was irrelevant. And more irrelevant was the fact that my entrepreneurial thirst was akin to a camel craving for water. My funda went like this.”I will write the CAT now. What if I suddenly develop an interest in the management field in the future?”.. Good futuristic thinking , one must say.

So, when the CAT registration window had opened this year, My friend  Uday, who incidentally is also my companion for all exams , fests, troubles and future extra marital affairs  declared “Let’s bell the CAT!”. Being busy-bee’s as we were , none of us found the time to drop in  a vist to the Axis Bank to buy the forms.. I woke up from my perennial inactivity on September 29^th , when my neighbor casually told me that banks will be closed the next day for some reason, September 30th being the last day to buy the forms. I had bunked the college that day because of illness, so I told Uday to get the forms.. But he had to attend labs that day failing which he would be suspended from the college for the next three and a half decades(Everything is possible in P.A.College of Engineering). So, I had to pull myself together and go in the rain to the bank, borrowing 2.6k from my hapless neighbors who were too polite to say no. I filled the form and stood in the long line , giving long stares at the clock like some people in our college do when a boy talks to a girl..When I was still in the middle  of the queue ,the time was 3:15 and the bank closed at 3:30. I was fidgeting around, and finally when there was only one person in front of me, the watchman came over to me and said that the counter for CAT forms was a different one. I gave him the most disgusted look I can give , but  because I was tired and ill , all I could muster was an expression of a puzzled man who at the same time felt the need to widen his eyeballs. But atleast I managed to extract a laugh from the watchman..

After the CAT vouchers were safe in the confines of my house, I decided to do the online registrations some other day because I was busy preparing for the journey to IIT Madras for the Shaastra fest(which deserves another post on its own). When I finally went around to registering for the both of us, I was shocked to find that most of the test centres were filled up.. As I was desperately re-clicking the options hoping for a miracle seat to emerge, dark thoughts started filling my mind.. What if the only test centre available now was in Nagaland or Meghalaya? I was already dreaming of cattle class tickets in trains sharing berths with unemployed Bangladeshi refugees when I finally got a seat.It was Garden City college . I found one for Uday in Sir. MVIT.

I feared my CAT would clash with the lab externals, and clash it did!. And that too at a time when I was suddenly overcome with the thirst to have a management degree and was doing reasonably well in the CAT mocks!.. Uday suggested me to bunk the lab externals, but then I realized that I was not so desperate .

Things started looking brighter when my lab externals got postponed for a couple of days. But then the crash happened..And if you type “Garden City College CAT” in google , you know what sort of a crash it was.. My college  consistently led the way in crashes.. It prominently featured in all news channels and the CAT main site. I bet it was on the verge of becoming a trending topic on Twitter if not for some crazy random stuff  Kayne West seemed to produce now and then.

And I gave up. I decided I had wasted money already, and it was pointless to shove some more into the abyss. I was even more dejected when I found my re-exam was on 4^th December, a day before my PW lab external.

It was December 3^rd, 7:30 P.M.My re-exam was on July 4^th.But that is when Uday re-entered the picture . He rattled away his usual catchphrases, of which one  was “If you are really interested , then go for it !!!” , spoken with a concealed clenched fist. Needless to say I decided to “GO FOR IT” and within twenty minutes(really) , I was in KSRTC with my voucher and admit card. I boarded the first bus I could find , only to realize that I had no money for the return ticket. Never mind , I said to myself , If you are really interested, then just go for it.

And the rest is history.

P.S: Pardon me for the badly constructed post . Reason(excuse) being that it was hastily written. Thanks to djds4rce who cajoled me into writing this one.